I owe it all to to social media
June 24, 2014: As a photographer, I’ve always been involved in online communities. Having an online presence is instrumental to becoming a successful photographer — and also a great way to meet other artists. When I was first started out, I didn’t necessarily have the funds to build and maintain my own photo website. So I turned to the online community Flickr.com.
Flickr has a talented and supportive community of emerging and established photographers, which I wanted to be a part of. Unfortunately, the site has taken its fair share of negative comments as far as photographers’ rights are concerned. It’s always important to be aware of your copyright/license laws when you’re hoping to make money from your work. The Internet makes it easy for people to share your work without attributing proper credit. Anything I posted to the site I didn’t mind losing. It was mainly a site for my “outtake” photos, Photoshop experiments, and old high school work. The goal was that visitors and fans that enjoyed my Flickr would then be prompted to contact me.
When I first became active on Flickr in 2007, it had a great tie-in with Google Image search. When tagging photos on Flickr, you had a good chance of landing on Google image search pages, if your tags were unique and accurate. Since then, the photo community online has grown: Google Plus, Tumblr, and Instagram have emerged as huge photo sharing platforms while Flickr has undergone changes in format and ownership. (These days you usually have to include “flickr” as part of your search to get Flickr results on Google.)
In 2011, after I had built myself a real website and forgot about my Flickr, I received an e-mail from publishing giant Random House. They were interested in one of my photographs for a book they were publishing. You may have heard of it: “Decoded: A Memoir”. Jay-Z’s memoir, to be exact. The photo they wanted to use was an old high school film photo from 2007. Where had they found it? The only place the photo existed was on my dusty old Flickr site. It turns out properly tagging my picture with words like “reflection” led them to my image.
So, long story short, there’s no harm in joining and sharing your work on social media. Be aware of the “ownership” of your work, as well as the tags you use to identify your piece. I share outtakes and “behind the scenes” photos to make people interested enough to check out my real site (where my photo assets are harder to steal). I’ve become fairly inactive on Flickr and moved on to sites like Instagram for photo sharing. However, I make sure to keep all of my contact info up-to-date on all platforms. You never know how people will discover your work!
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